Truancy Club

Lush Pop from Chicago and Twangy Local Indie -- an audio visual explosion! Truancy Club is a view into a world inside Bret Koontz's head, mapped out by live and sampled music and visuals as video projections, a world painted on the head of a pin. Koontz's music and art-making in Chicago describe a winding path— synthpop bands, darkwave folk, films, plays, and animation. Truancy Club blends traces from all these mediums into one unique experience. Truancy Club's sound is a study of light and dark, smooth and jagged. Candy-colored elements of City Pop and Hyperpop are anchored by more subdued passages that evoke Prefab Sprout and the Blue Nile. The songs' driving grooves are collaged from home-made samples, thematically relevant field recordings, acoustic instruments, and drum machines. Above these grooves float woven lattices of electric guitar lines and Bret's lush and substantive vocals. At the heart of these tunes is a deep commitment to songcraft and narrative: “Chicago’s Bret Koontz makes music that can match some of the best tunesmiths & songwriters of the twentieth century.” -Sjimon Gompers, Impose Magazine The video element brings similar explorations of contrast, ranging from ridiculous to devastating. Collaged of visual representations of audio samples, narrative elements, symbolic gestures, and lyric subtitles, they build a visual environment for the music to live in. Bret's latest release is “a Sparkle Road Cult,” a large-format Pop record featuring a slew of Chicago musicians. It was released by Earth Libraries Records in 2022. The new Truancy Club record is in production and will be released in 2027.